What is intelligent scheduling and why is it crucial for your company?

Scheduling is crucial to maximising your team’s productivity and optimising the talent on your team. If your company still uses manual scheduling, chances are that your back office is wasting time making manual changes to respond to on-ground changes. You probably also experience some amount of human error. There might be challenges getting the right person to the right job. 

And if you’re a start-up or a one man army, you might have difficulty planning your appointments in the most efficient, time- and cost-effective manner. 

If this sounds familiar, you can already see why intelligent scheduling could make things easier.

What is Intelligent Scheduling? 

Intelligent scheduling software uses technology to tap into data and allocate work or make appointments. It connects your back office and your customer-facing, on-ground workers in a convenient, single-window set up and gives them the tools to avoid errors and optimise resources. 

So what does intelligent scheduling do exactly?

Intelligent scheduling tools will give you a bundle of insights that allow your back office folks to allocate work more efficiently. They get:

1 - Insights into skills and capabilities of all your on-ground team members corresponding to the live jobs

• 2 - Real-time location and job progress details 
• 3 - Abilities and limitations of the on-ground team based on feedback from prior jobs performed 
• 4 - Availability and pipeline of jobs already allocated 
• 5 - Live updates on delays or sudden changes in availability/ job requirements so that they can set the relevant changes in motion

Why is Intelligent Scheduling important for your business? 

Intelligent scheduling is crucial for your company because it reduces your costs, elevates efficiency levels and improves your customer experience, or in other words, delivers benefits any business could use. 

Here are 8 reasons why you cannot afford to ignore smart scheduling: 

1.  You cannot afford errors

Unless you enjoy a monopoly in your market, you don’t want to take any chances upsetting your customers. If a service provider or on-ground expert is supposed to reach them at a specified time and they do not deliver as promised, the chances are that you have lost the chance to do business with that customer in the future. Intelligent scheduling helps you to minimise – maybe even eliminate – your no-shows.

2. Cost-management can tip the scales

Post-pandemic, the market has moved swiftly from recovery mode to recession mode. Tons of companies are downsizing non-vital roles to stay profitable. If you are similarly stuck working with a slimmer workforce in your back-office, you can make their hours go further using intelligent scheduling. Ramped up productivity is one of smart scheduling’s biggest benefits. 

3. You need to maintain your customer experience

Even if your on-ground team has 360-degree training and experience, every individual is typically better than their peers at some tasks. With intelligent scheduling, you can tap into specific customer feedback and insights to assign the best person within a geography for a job. This translates to an excellent, 5-star-worthy customer experience every time. 

Smart scheduling usually also lets you track your on-ground team – this is especially useful in places where heavy traffic or unexpected road conditions might affect punctuality.

4. You need agility in workflow management

Reducing response time is one of the most popular benefits of intelligent scheduling. But that’s only one piece – there’s more. Especially if you’re trimming teams and are unable to offer raises and bonuses in a difficult market, you cannot afford to be overburdening your on-ground team. But at the same time, you cannot afford to bail on a committed customer appointment. 

With intelligent scheduling, you can be more agile in responding to on-ground changes swiftly. It's easier to show empathy to an on-ground service provider when you are not stressed about how you will deliver on your commitment to the customer. Intelligent scheduling will give you an at-a-glance view of which other providers might be able to fill in.

5. Reporting is as important as ever

Whether you’re privately funded or publicly listed, or you’re a founder-funded business, you need reports to judge whether your business is on track to meet its revenue goals. Smart scheduling tools typically deliver regular, real-time reports on the pipeline of jobs your business can look forward to, profits, costs, and other key business metrics. 

6. Anytime-anywhere access is imperative

The remote working culture got the world used to anytime-anywhere access, and instant answers. It also made remote teams a reality. (Not to mention that not renewing your lease and letting people work from home might be just what the doctor ordered, with a recession looming.) Smart scheduling tools often offer mobile or app-based access to your dashboards and job calendars so that you can make changes on the go. 

7. You need to perform due diligence to worker safety

Depending on the type of business you are in, there could be hazards linked to certain jobs. Smart scheduling gives you visibility into these hazards and also allows you to give your on-ground employee advance notice about these so that they can go into the job prepared. 

8. Better support to teams and streamlining of back-end

This is crucial to plan inventory or machinery that may be required for certain types of jobs, or to provide manager support to field workers when required. 

Make your scheduling intelligent today!

Customer focus seems to be a big buzzword in 2023, as it has in the past couple of years. And now, markets are becoming more challenging amidst threats of full-blown economic recession. In this environment, you need to take concrete steps to maintain your customer experience and streamline your business to lower your costs. Take a big step in the right direction and be smarter about your scheduling. 

Looking for the right intelligent scheduling software for your needs? Jump to Zoftware to get quick look at all your options in one place.